readings's blog

with poets: David Barnes, Bibi Jacob and Fiona Sze-Lorrain

When: Tuesday, September 17
Where: Carrs Pub, 1 rue du Mont Thabor, 75001 Paris
Mtro: Tuileries or Concorde
Drinks upstairs at the bar from 7 p.m. Poetry downstairs at 7.30 sharp, please!

David Barnes is a British psychotherapist, teacher, poet and short-story writer who has lived in Paris since 2003. His prose explores relationships and his poetry ranges from love poetry to humour to polemic. He founded and hosts the hugely popular SpokenWord Paris open mic series - see spokenwordparis.org - and The Other Writers Group at Shakespeare and Co. He is the Editor of The Bastille magazine and was the Prose Editor of Strangers in Paris: New Writing Inspired by the City of Light. He won Shakespeare & Company’s short story competition Travel in Words in 2006. He has been published in Upstairs at Duroc, Spot Lit Magazine, 34th Parallel, Retort Magazine and elsewhere.

Bibi Jacob studied literature at Kings College, Cambridge and theatre at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq, Paris. Having worked as a diamond messenger, busker, storyteller, tutor and theatre performer, she is now settled in the City of Light as a voice actor. Her writing has appeared in issue.ZERO, The Bastille, Paragram, Belleville Park Pages and on the &#fb02;ash&#fb01;ction.it website. She regularly performs her work and her Poets Live reading marks the launch of her chapbook, Glittery City.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in English, Chinese and French. Born in Singapore, she grew up in a hybrid of cultures and studied in the UK and the US before obtaining her PhD from Paris IV-Sorbonne. Her &#fb01;rst collection of poetry, Water the Moon, appeared in 2010 and her latest collection, My Funeral Gondola, came out this spring. In addition to her four books of translation of contemporary Chinese poets and her prose translations of Hai Zi, she has translated Romanian-born French poet Ghrasim Luca and American poet Mark Strand. She is the co-editor of several anthologies and the co-founder of Cerise Press and a contributing editor to M€noa. With Gao Xingjian, she co-authored Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian. She currently works as an editor at Vif ditions, Paris. Also a zheng harpist, she has performed worldwide. Her CD, In One Take, was released in 2010. &#fb01;onasze.com

Next POETS LIVE reading will be October 15, 2013.

Tuesday, June 18 starting at 7 p.m. POETS LIVEs last reading before September, at Carrs Pub,1 rue du Mont Thabor, 75001 Paris, Mtro: Tuileries or Concorde. Drinks upstairs at the bar at 7 p.m., Poetry downstairs at 7.30 sharp, please!

Come hear and celebrate the poetry of:

Sue Chenette, a classical pianist as well as a poet, grew up in northern Wisconsin, lives in Toronto, and spends time in Paris whenever she can. She is an editor for the Canadian poetry press Brick Books, and co-editor of the anthology Cry Uncle, from Aeolus Press. Her books include Slender Human Weight (Guernica Editions, 2009), long-listed for the ReLit award, and The Bones of his Being (Guernica Editions, 2012), as well as three chapbooks: Solitude in Cloud and Sun, A Transport of Grief, and The Time Between Us, which won the Canadian Poetry Associations Shaunt Basmajian Award. Her poems have been widely anthologized and have appeared in literary journals in Canada and the U.S., and in the Paris journal Upstairs at Duroc.

Dylan Harris was born. In 1957 in the UK just before the launch of sputnik in Dublin. Where he co-founded & co-operated wurm? Im apfel in Paris he launched poets live and corrupt. Press in Luxembourg he hasn’t done much. Yet his books include antwerp and the liberation. of [placeholder] see more. Works at dylanharris.org.

Andrew Parkin has been an active poet since emigrating from England to Canada in 1970. His &#fb01;rst collection, Dancers in a Web (Turnstone Press, 1987, reprinted 1991), a later one, Hong Kong Poems (Ronsdale,1997, reprinted 1999 ), and most recently Star with a Thousand Moons (Ekstasis) were all published in Canada. A distinguished Canadian critic, Jack Stewart, has published essays on Andrews poetry. Andrew has given readings in many di&#fb00;erent countries and has been asked to read in Vancouver in September this year for the Chinese Canadian Writers Association. He lives in Paris as well as Canada.

A review of this reading can be found here.

7pm, Tuesday May 28th, Carrs, 1 rue Mont-Thabor, M Tuileries/Concorde.

Join us for an evening of poetry and image, with an English poet, a Swedish poet and a Swedish photographer — the reading, as always, will be in English. Come at 7 p.m. for a drink at the bar, the reading will begin at 7.30 (on the dot), downstairs in le cave.

POETS
lars palm lives with his lovely wife Petra, currently in Malm. hes the author of three books: road song for (corrupt press, 2011), chaos on/chaos o&#fb00; (obvious epiphanies press, 2012) & means (The Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, forthcoming) as well as many chapbooks in print & online, most recently mulhouse (greying ghost pamphlet #39, 2012). he has held a few odd jobs in a few places, including Stockholm, Dublin & Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, is trained as an actor/playwright, organic producer & assistant nurse & has a slow career as a model. he blogs at mischievoice.

Carol Watts lives in London. Her work includes Wrack (2007) and Occasionals (2011), both published by Reality Street, and a number of chapbooks including the When Blue Light Falls series with Oystercatcher Press, and Mother Blake (Equipage, 2012). Her work across media includes an ongoing collaboration with sound artist Will Montgomery, which began with Pitch in 2011. Carol’s collection Sundog is forthcoming with Veer Books in 2013. She directs the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck, University of London.

PHOTOGRAPHER
Petra Palm, a.k.a SocialPhotographer, lives in Malm, Sweden (at least at the moment) with her beloved husband Lars Palm. She works for the people in various creative areas: photo, radio, &#fb01;lm, football songs, childrens books…. Some of her work has been exhibited and some published. Petra and Lars collaborate as PoFot. Follow her work here.

at Carrs Pub, 1 rue du Mont Thabor, 75001 Paris, Mtro: Tuileries

7pm, Tuesday April 16th, Carrs, 1 rue Mont-Thabor, M Tuileries/Concorde.
POETS LIVE returns to usual weekday, hour and venue!

One American poet and two French poets – the reading will be in English.

Christophe Lamiot Enos was born in Beaumont-le-Roger, France and spent over &#fb01;&#fb05;een years in English-speaking countries. He now lives in Paris and is matre de confrences at the University of Rouen. Hes had two literary essays and seven verse narratives published in France and elsewhere, including four by Flammarion, Paris, in the Poesie collection directed by Yves di Manno. On April 16 he will be launching The Sun Brings, his &#fb01;rst collection of poems in English, just out from corrupt press.

William Walrond Strangmeyer was born in Virginia, grew up in New York and New Jersey, where he went to Rutgers University. He has worked in many di&#fb00;erent &#fb01;elds of endeavor, including Palisades and other amusement parks as a caller, as well as banks, book stores, the cinema, the theater, door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales, restaurants, insurance sales, taxi driving, telephone sales, warehouses and as a tour guide — around the U.S. and in Copenhagen, Athens, Crete, London and Switzerland. Now a thirty-&#fb01;ve-year resident of Paris, he continues to earn his living as an English language trainer and translator. His main in&#fb02;uences are science &#fb01;ction, doo-wop and psychedelic music along with the usual Eliot, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Poe, Catullus, Larkin, Elroy, Doctor Seuss, Forugh Farrokhzad, Baudelaire and also Emmylou Harris, Roy Jones Jr., Stoya, Leonard Cohen, Fedor Emilianenko, Bartok, Rodney Crowell, Nolan Strong, Leroy Gri&#fb03;n and Roy Orbison. Others come and go.

Anne Talvaz was born in Brussels in 1963, and studied literature and languages in France. She spent several years in China and Brazil, and currently lives near Paris. She writes in French and has published three poetry collections: Imagines, 2002, Panaches de mer, lithophytes et coquilles, 2006, and Pourquoi le Minotaure est triste, 2010. She is also the author of an essay/novel on Lina Heydrich, Ce que nous sommes (2008) and a travel book about her experiences in China. She has translated poetry for many years from English and Spanish into French, and from French into English, most of it published in magazines and anthologies. Books include John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Nina Karacosta’s Previous Vertigos, and Pansy Maurer-Alvarez’s Ant-Small and Amorous. An English translation of Katana by Marie Etienne is due to be published by Ravenna Press this year.

POETS LIVE will read again on May 28 and June 18.

Friday, March 22 at 8:30 pm. A&#fb05;er a short winter break Poets Live is back for the Printemps des Potes with an evening of poetry and song, featuring guest Kerry Featherstone from the UK and the two Paris based poets, Pansy Maurer-Alvarez and Rufo Quintavalle. There will be a book/CD table as well as a drinks table.

le BAL (in the gallery space)
6, impasse de la Dfence
75018 Paris
Mtro: Place de Clichy

Please note change of weekday, hour and place for this event.

Kerry Featherstone is a poet, songwriter and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Loughborough University. His poems have been published in journals such as Cleaves, The Journal and Tears in the Fence. Kerry has lived and worked in France, and writes poetry and song-lyrics in French and English. Recent poems based on his translation of a novel by Ingrid Thobois appeared in the Parnassus edition of Modern Poetry in Translation. He is also working on a novel set in the Vende. The CD ‘Concealed Exit’ by his band ‘The Orange’ is available on itunes and amazon. It features the double-bass playing of Chris Poole, and guest musicians on strings and &#fb02;ute. The Orange have played at a range of clubs, venues and festivals, including supporting Richard Shindell on his last UK tour. Kerry will be playing a solo set of songs from Concealed Exit plus some new ones.

Pansy Maurer-Alvarez was born in Puerto Rico, grew up in Pennsylvania and has lived in Europe since 1973. She did her literary studies at universities in the US, Spain and later in Switzerland, where she worked for a time as a teacher and translator. She began writing full time and publishing widely a&#fb05;er moving to Paris, over 20 years ago. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies and numerous magazines throughout Europe and the States and some of her poems have been translated into French, German and Spanish. She has read at venues in France, the UK and the US and has lead workshops in the UK. Her collections are: Dolores: The Alpine Years and When the Body Says Its Leaving (both from Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn); Lovers Eternally Nearing, a &#fb01;ne press collaboration with the Swiss artist Walter Ehrismann, with German translations by Rudolf Bhler (Editions Thomas Howeg, Zurich) and Ant-Small and Amorous, with French translations by Anne Talvaz (corrupt press, Paris).

Rufo Quintavalle was born in London in 1978, studied at Oxford and the University of Iowa and now lives in Paris. He is the author of Make Nothing Happen (Oystercatcher Press, 2009), Dog, cock, ape and viper (corrupt press, 2011) and Liquiddity (Oystercatcher Press, 2011). From 2009 until 2012 he was poetry editor for the award-winning webzine, Nthposition. His work has been widely published in print and online journals around the world and has been nominated for both the Michael Marks Award and the Pushcart Prize.

Tuesday November 6th, 19h00, at Le Bal Cafe, 6 Impasse de la Dfense, 75018 Paris (mtro Place de Clichy). NOTE THE CHANGED LOCATION.

Alice Notley has earned a reputation as one of the most challenging and engaging poets at work today. Fiercely independent, she has never tried to be anything other than a poet, and all of her ancillary activities have been directed to that end. She is the author of over twenty books of poetry, and also the author of a book of essays on poets and poetry, Coming A&#fb05;er.

Notley was a &#fb01;nalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. In the spring of 2001, she received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award. She edited and wrote a new introduction to her late husband Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets (Penguin, 2000). Recently, Notley edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (UC, 2005) with her sons, the poets Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan.

On October 3, 2007, The Academy of American Poets announced its selection of Notley’s Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970“2005 for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. In 1997, she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

Author of twelve books of poetry, Joe Ross was born in Pennsylvania and graduated magna cum laude from the Honors Program at Temple University in Philadelphia. In 2004, he and his wife moved to Paris, where their two children were born, and where he continues to publish while working as an educator and translator. His most recent titles are: Strati (Bi-lingual Italian/English, La Camera Verde, 2007); FRACTURED // Conections (Bi-lingual Italian/English, La Camera Verde, 2008); Strata (Dusie Press, 2008) and Wordlick (Green Integer, 2011).

Amy Hollowell, the author of Peneloping, will be launching her &#fb01;rst collection, Giacommetrics (both corrupt press). She is an American-born Parisian poet, journalist and translator. She helped edit the Paris-based review Pharos, founded by Alice Notley and the late Douglas Oliver, and is a former student of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. In 2004, she founded the Wild Flower Zen group, which she continues to lead in France and Portugal.

Tuesday November 6th, 19h00, at Le Bal Cafe, 6 Impasse de la Dfense, 75018 Paris (mtro Place de Clichy). NOTE THE DIFFERENT LOCATION.

Poets Live is pleased to announce its &#fb01;rst reading of the 2012/13 season this coming Tuesday, September 11th at Carr’s Pub (1 rue du Mont Thabor, 75001 Paris). The evening will begin at 19h and will feature three poets, Kate Noakes, David Barnes and Gareth Storey.

Kate Noakes is an elected member of the Welsh Academi. Her most recent collection is Cape Town which will be published by Eyewear Publishing (London) on 1 October 2012. Her previous collections are The Wall Menders (Two Rivers Press, 2009) and Ocean to Interior (Mighty Erudite, 2007). Kate has a MPhil in Creative Writing and has taught for Oxford University. She has performed at venues as diverse as Glastonbury Festival and Henley Literature Festival. She has lived in Paris since 2011.

David Barnes was born in 1971 in Reading, England and studied American Studies at Manchester University. Since 2003 he has lived in Paris where he runs writing workshops and the very successful English poetry open mike he founded, SpokenWord Paris. He co-edited the anthology Strangers in Paris: New Writing Inspired by the City of Light (Tightrope Books, 2011) and self-publishes Issue.Zero Lit Journal featuring many poets from SpokenWord Paris. He won Shakespeare & Company’s short story competition in 2006. His poems have been published in Spot Lit Magazine, 39th Parallel, Upstairs At Duroc and elsewhere.

Gareth Eoin Storey has been scribbling in notebooks since adolescence throwing various in&#fb02;uences into the stockpot of his head. As much inspired by ol’ dirty bastard as William Carlos Williams, and the usual: 1970s cinema, heavyweight boxing, Picasso, the black dog, misplaced meringues…His work has been published in horror sleaze trash, the smoking poet, alternative reel and various other rags and next year his &#fb01;rst collection Hangover House will be released by black co&#fb00;ee press in Detroit. He loves Giulia and Fernet Branca.

Monday June 11th, 19h00, at Le Bal Cafe, 6 Impasse de la Dfense, 75018 Paris (mtro Place de Clichy).

Poets Live is pleased to be presenting an evening of Oulipian poetry featuring Harry Mathews, Ian Monk, Doug Nufer, Wendy Walker, Tom La Farge and Daniel Levin Becker.

Wendy Walker is the author of My Man and Other Critical Fictions, Blue Fire, The Secret Service, and two volumes of tales. She is the editor of Proteotypes and co-leader of the Writhing Society in Brooklyn.

Tom La Farge has written two novels, Zuntig, and The Crimson Bears, and a book of fablels, Terror of Earth. He co-founded the Writhing Society, a weekly salon for constrained writing in Brooklyn, and has written the &#fb01;rst three pamphlets of a manual, 13 Writhing Machines, that discusses various constraints. Administrative Assemblages came out in December, 2008, Homomorphic Converters in September, 2009, and Echo Alternators, in September, 2010. Three Writhings appeared in the &Now Awards 2009. His chapbook, Life and Conversation of Animals, a deformation of Gilbert Whites The Natural History of Selborne, appeared in August, 2010. Hes currently working on a series of three novels, The Broken House, Skin, and Gathering of Ghosts, in various stages of completion.

Daniel Levin Becker is reviews editor of The Believer and the youngest member of the Oulipo. His &#fb01;rst book, Many Subtle Channels: in Praise of Potential Literature (Harvard) was just released.

Harry Mathews is an American novelist, poet, essayist, and memoirist. His most recent book is The New Tourism (poems, Sand Piper Press, Key West, Florida).

Ian Monk was born in London, but now lives in Lille, France. A&#fb05;er contributing to the Oulipo Compendium, he became a member of Oulipo in 1988. He has published books in English, such as Family Archeology and Writings for the Oulipo, in French (Plouk Town and La Jeunesse de Mek-Ouyes, and even in both (N/S, with Frederic Forte)). [Frederic needs accents Rufo’s e-mail can’t do.]

Doug Nufer is the author of seven novels, including the Oulipian novels Never Again, Negativeland, and By Kelman Out of Pessoa, and a poetry collection, We Were Werewolves. He lives in Seattle, where he sells wine.

AT : Le Bal Cafe, 6 Impasse de la Dfense, 75018 Paris (mtro Place de Clichy).

7pm, Tuesday May 22nd, Carr’s, 1 rue Mont-Thabor, M Tuileries/Concorde

GERALD MANGAN. Born Glasgow 1951. Poet, playwright, journalist, painter and cartoonist. Collections include Waiting for the Storm (Bloodaxe; Scottish Arts Council Book Award 1991); stage-plays include Crying Wolf. Former writer-in-residence at Dundee College of Art and at Theatre Workshop in Edinburgh, where he also worked as an actor and designer. He has given readings of his work throughout the UK, Ireland and France as well as on radio and TV, usually accompanied by his own music. He spent most of the 1970s in Ireland and now lives in Paris, reviewing and illustrating for the Times Literary Supplement and other journals. Mangans e&#fb00;ort is to see matters clearly, which itself becomes an expression of a&#fb00;ection. (Sean OBrien, TLS) Quite simply he is one of the best Scottish poets of his generation. (Douglas Dunn)

Eddie Linden (b.1935) Scots-Irish poet, editor since 1969 of the prestigious London-based literary magazine Aquarius. Born in Northern Ireland of Irish parents, he grew up in Scotland, where he worked in a steel-mill before emigrating to London. His &#fb01;rst collection of poetry was City of Razors (1980), and his most recent is A Thorn in the Flesh (Hearing Eye, 2011). There is no one like Eddie (Harold Pinter) Eddie Linden is a human event.(John Montague) If Eddie didn’t exist, no one would have dared to invent him. (Brian Patten)

Monty Reid is a well-known Canadian poet. He lives in Ottawa, where he was, until recently, the Director of Exhibitions at the Canadian Museum of Nature. He now writes and gardens full time. He will launch his new corrupt press chapbook, Garden (dec unit).

MEGHAN MCNEALY is a Pataphysician, poet, performer, playwright, printer, papermaker, and polyglot. She is a New England-born Acadian who earned her Bachellors Degree in Liberal Arts from The Evergreen State College. Her texts have appeared in Wheelhouse, BirdDog, Admit2, and Slightly West; she has illustrated Nothings Houses: Prefab Eulogies by David Wolach [BlazeVox, 2010] and Collobert Orbital by Johan Jnson [Displaced Press, 2009]; her original performances have been staged at the literary conference, Press: Activism & The Avant-Garde as well as the 2010 Olympia Film Festival, Thtre de Verre in Paris, and The Art Factory in Buenos Aires. Limite Dsir (corrupt press, 2012) is her rst chapbook.

Wednesday, April 11th, 19h00, Carr’s, 1 rue Mont Thabor, M Tuileries / Concorde / Pyramides

An evening of readings to celebrate the international quarterly Poetry Wales, with editor Zo Skoulding and contributors to the magazine from Wales and Paris.

Jean Portante was born in Di&#fb00;erdange (Luxembourg) in 1950. He is of Italian origin and lives in Paris. He has written widely-translated novels, stories, plays and poetry, published in Luxembourg, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Qubec, Ireland, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Germany, Slovakia, Argentina and Colombia. He has translated numerous poets into French, including Juan Gelman, Jerome Rothenberg, Pierre Joris, John Deane, Gonzalo Rojas and Maria Luisa Spaziani.

In 2003 his book LEtrange langue was given the Mallarm award in France, and in the same year he won the French Grand Prix dAutomne de la Socit des Gens de Lettres for his life’s work. In 2011 he was awarded the Batty Weber Prize in Luxembourg and in 2012 the Fondane Prize in Paris. His selected poems, La Cendre des mots. is published by Editions le Castor Astral (2005) His latest books are Le Travail du poumon (Editions Le Castor Astral, 2006), Je veux dire, (Editions Estuaires, 2007); En ralit, (Editions Phi, 2008), and La rinvention de l’oubli (Editions le Castor Astral, June 2010). As a novelist, his works include Mrs Haroy ou la mmoire de la baleine, which is widely translated.

Since 2006, Jean Portante has been a member of the Acadmie Mallarm. In 2008, he founded, in France, with poet Jacques Darras, the poetry magazine Inuits dans la jungle, while in Luxembourg he edits the literary magazine Transkrit.

Zo Skouldings most recent collections of poems are Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008), long-listed for Wales Book of the Year 2009, and The Mirror Trade (Seren, 2004). Her collaborative work includes Dark Wires with poet Ian Davidson (West House Books, 2007), From Here, with images by Simonetta Moro (Dusie, 2008) and You Will Live in Your Own Cathedral with sound by Alan Holmes (LAF-Seren, 2009). She is a member of the group Parking Non-Stop, whose album Species Corridor was released by Klangbad in 2008. She lectures at Bangor University and has been Editor of the international quarterly Poetry Wales since 2008.

Lyndon Davies is a poet, reviewer and essayist living in Powys. He has published two collections of poetry, Hyphasis (Parthian Press 2006) and Shield (Parthian Press 2010) . His poems and critical articles have appeared in various magazines, as well as in the anthologies Poetry Wales forty years (Seren 2005) and The Pterodactyls Wing (Parthian 2003). With poet Graham Hartill he runs the Glasfryn Seminars, a series of discussion groups on aspects of literature. He is also a co-organiser, with poet John Goodby of the yearly festival of innovative poetry The Hay Poetry Jamboree.

Steven Hitchins is a poet from the South Wales valleys: born in Abercynon, currently living in Pontypridd. He tries to map these urban-rural, industrial-pastoral borderzones through collage and walking. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Wales, Fire and Chimera. His article ‘Poetry: Music: Space’ is in Junction Box issue 2. He occasionally edits the small press/little magazine/blog, The Literary Pocket Book, from which his homemade pamphlets The Basin and Palisade Winters are available.

Rhys Trimble is a bilingual poet, improvisational performer and editor from Bethesda and Pontneddfechan. He is interested in heterglossic, psychogeographic, mythic and radical pastoral poetry. Rhys is published widely, including in Angel Exhaust, Poetry Wales, Skald, Tears in the Fence, Aesthetica, Seventh Quarry and elsewhere. He was a John Tripp &#fb01;nalist in 2009 and winner of the Cinnamon Press Collection Competition. Recent publications include Keinc (Cinnamon Press 2010) and Mynydd (Hafan 2012).